Working with text without pain

Published on June 7, 2017

For some time I wanted to write about how I do typing and text editing in general. This is because I’ve noticed that many people I know (mainly software developers) started to complain about pains in hands. I have to admit that also faced this issue a couple of years ago. Since then though, I managed to eliminate the problem completely and currently I type as long and as much as I want and do not experience any pain at all. Here I describe the combination of hardware/settings/techniques that helped me.

The keyboard

In 2015 I still was doing all my work using a laptop, so my typing experience was that of a man who has to use a built-in laptop keyboard. At that time it did not occur to me that the built-in keyboard is outright dangerous for health. In retrospect, I can name the following flaws:

One has to keep hands in an unnatural position—too close to each other. In addition to that, the position is not symmetric: while the left hand can be kept in more-or-less natural position, the right hand is usually shifted to the left because of insufficient distance between the resting positions of the hands.
Pinkies are overloaded and thumbs (the strongest fingers) are only used to press the spacebar. One might argue that remapping could be used to alleviate the problem, but in my experience it is not true, as the important, non-alphabetic keys are all placed in positions that can be reached only by pinkies. There is nothing in the middle of the keyboard that could be comfortably operated by thumbs: only the spacebar.
The keys are staggered so one has to stretch his/her fingers in weird ways to reach keys that are not in the home row. Why do those completely unnatural movements? This decreases accuracy too.
As an Emacs user, I had to use the ⎈ Ctrl key a lot and so I followed the popular advice to make ⇪ Caps Lock to function as the left ⎈ Ctrl. This looked like a win at first (certainly better than the default position of the left ⎈ Ctrl). Only later I realized that it makes my poor left pinkie do even more work. Also, this introduces an additional asymmetry because I did not make my ↵ Enter to function as the right ⎈ Ctrl. So I quickly started to use the ⇪ Caps Lock in lieu of both ⎈ Ctrl keys: left and right.

It did not take long before strange sensations in my left pinkie started to undermine my productivity as a keyboard user. Because of all those asymmetries my posture wasn’t quite straight too.

When I realized that I may lose my ability to work as efficiently as I used to, I started to look for a better keyboard. From the previous points it follows that “a better keyboard” should:

Be either split or have enough space between the clusters for left and right hand, so a straight, natural posture could be maintained without effort.
Should have some keys that could be operated by thumbs to unload pinkies.
Should have straight layout of keys for each hand so they form a “matrix”.
Should have all modifier keys (⇧ Shift, ⎈ Ctrl, and ⎇ Alt) in symmetric positions for each hand, to help divide work load evenly between hands.
It should be mechanical, since mechanical keyboards feel better and hopefully, last longer.

To solve the problem once and for all, I decided that I’d buy a keyboard that satisfies those criteria no matter the price. After some research I bought Kinesis Advantage, which is now discontinued because Kinesis came up with a newer model, Kinesis Advantage 2 QD (hi-res image):

Kinesis Advantage 2 QD

I bought this one too as soon as it became available. The “QD” part in the name tells us that this is a version with dual-legended QWERTY/Dvorak key caps, which is exactly what I need as a Dvorak typist.

This keyboard satisfies all my requirements. All the keys are mechanical, including those smaller function keys. In addition to that it’s fully programmable, with bells and whistles, stores all configuration in its own memory, works nicely out-of-the-box on Linux (and can be reprogrammed without any additional software that usually requires access to a Windows machine with other keyboards).

Being a professional software developer, spending $369 for a thing as vital as keyboard is absolutely justified. These keyboards are known to work without any issues for 10 years straight, so it’s a nice investment too.

Sequences of keys vs chords

To make typing as easy and comfortable as possible, it makes sense to avoid key chords and prefer sequences of keys. This follows from the simple fact that typing several keys in sequence is easier (and safer in long term) than holding several keys. Many Emacs users suffer from RSI because the default Emacs shortcuts are quite brain-damaged in this regard.

I have replaced most shortcuts in Emacs with key sequences starting with an “introducing key”. We can choose a single key, whose seul rôle will be starting key sequences. How long should every such a key sequence be? Of course, we want it to be as short as possible, but we cannot use only one key after the introducing key, because the total number of combinations won’t be satisfactory. But we can use two keys after the introducing key (Page Down in my case), then we get 26 × 26 = 676 combinations! (In practice, we get even more because of punctuation and numbers.) Not bad at all. There are enough combinations for us to prefer those that have some mnemonic value. For example, when I need to invoke grep from Emacs I just type Page Down g r.

Sticky keys

As a continuation of the previous point about key sequences being better than key chords, here comes the “sticky keys” feature. This feature is provided by all major operating systems and desktop environments and allows to type modifier keys like ⇧ Shift and ⎈ Ctrl before the key you want to add them to. So to type a capital “A” I hit ⇧ Shift without holding it I then type “a” and here we go—an easier, better typing experience. Another benefit is increased accuracy, as it’s virtually impossible to “apply” ⇧ Shift to more key strokes than intended.

I started to use this technique in 2015 and now if it’s disabled for some reason I just don’t bother to type capital letters at all because it requires holding shift, which is an unnatural movement for me now.

The common complaint from people who do not use this is that they don’t want to have “state” in their typing. I can only say that after a while it becomes very, very rare to leave a “hanging” modifier so that it gets applied to a keystroke you don’t want to apply it to. On the other hand, typing with “sticky keys” is a lot easier and feels more natural. Give it a try!

Even with “sticky keys” and sequential key bindings for most tasks, common, intensive editing commands like “go to beginning of the line” (⎈ Ctrl+a by default in Emacs) still require holding a modifier key. “Sticky keys” is not exactly a win in this case, as combinations like ⎈ Ctrl+n may need to be pressed several times in a row. The fact that the number of keys located in convenient positions is limited suggests that we must use different “layers” for editing: one layer would input keys as usual while another layer would run various common editing commands using the same keys.

The idea is nothing new, of course, this is how Vi works. The technique is called modal editing because we sort of have (at least) two modes of operation: insert mode and normal mode (if we choose to follow the Vi terminology). This allows to avoid holding any modifier keys.

Vi users already edit modally, while in the Emacs world there are several ways to do that. For more information on the topic I suggest reading this article, which is actually the README.md file for the package I’ve written and use personally—Modalka. The README.md compares all packages in existence for modal editing in Emacs and describes why you might want to try Modalka.

That’s it, currently I never hold modifier keys, or any keys at all for that matter. All my editing happens through typing sequences of keys—that is, normal typing experience.

Keyboard layout

QWERTY is a terrible historical accident, but switching to an alternative keyboard layout such as Dvorak is still optional in my opinion, provided you have a good keyboard and do not ever hold any keys/use key chords.

However, Dvorak will make typing more comfortable. I can confirm this as a person who switched a year ago. I still remember the difference. If you don’t want to take my word for it, here is this article which explains why Dvorak is objectively better for typing English.

Conclusion